Toro-Morn began addressing the complexities of migration while researching the dimensions of social class and gender of the Puerto Rican migration to Chicago. “Compared to the New York experience, there has been relatively little work that has documented the experiences of Puerto Ricans in the city of Chicago,” said Toro-Morn. “I am part of a generation of scholars that has taken on that task.” In an article published in Revista de Ciencias Sociales, a prestigious peer-reviewed journal published by the University of Puerto Rico, Toro-Morn addressed the gender specific nature of the first wave of Puerto Rican workers that came to Chicago to do domestic work by analyzing documents she found in the National Archives. “I traced the gender and racial ideologies that shaped the movement of Puerto Rican women domestic workers. This work has contributed to the historicizing of Puerto Rican migration to the Midwest and to making the experiences of early Puerto Rican women migrants visible,” said Toro-Morn. “At another level, this work is also significant because it contributes to analyzing how gender and race systems of inequality intersect in the recruitment and deployment of Latina (Puerto Rican) women workers.”    

Ten years after commencing her work on the Puerto Rican migration to Chicago, Toro-Morn is still fascinated by the topic. “I feel I have developed a more complex, theoretical, and historical understanding of the community’s experience in the context of Chicago, as a global city.” In order to enrich her research, she is currently working in collaboration with several colleagues from various universities in Illinois. “We are a group of scholars known for our work about Chicago’s Puerto Rican/Latino community and represent the disciplines of anthropology, language and literature, cultural studies, American studies, sociology, women’s studies, and rhetorical studies,” said Toro-Morn. “The group is interested in theorizing the uniqueness of Chicago’s latinidad, which has been relatively ignored in Latino studies.” 

As her research and teaching reflect, Toro-Morn is devoted to investigating, teaching, and working toward equality for people on issues of ethnicity, race, gender, and social class. This commitment was recognized in 1998 when Toro-Morn was awarded the David Strand Diversity Award. She regularly teaches courses for the Women’s Studies Program and most recently for the Latin American and Latino Studies Program. “I am currently teaching a course that serves as an introduction to that area of study, and I am very excited and hopeful that the minor in Latin American and Latino Studies will become a source of pride for the College and the University,” said Toro-Morn. “The minor represents a major opportunity to link our scholarly work and teaching responsibilities. This is a critical institutional moment in the history of Illinois State as more and more students that are interested in the area of Latin American and Latino Studies will have educational and professional opportunities to complement their majors.”

Toro-Morn’s latest research project is a second book tentatively titled A Gendered View of Global Migrations. “My goal is to analyze how gender, race, and class differentiate the movement of women and men from the developing and underdeveloped South to the post-industrial centers of the global economy,” said Toro-Morn. “In this book, I examine the contributions of gender scholars in the field of migration and show how the new research on gender and migration has deepened and enhanced our understanding of the migration process empirically and theoretically. A gendered analysis of migration critiques the idea that decisions about consumption, production, fertility, marriage, and migration are made collectively within the family and that family members pool their income and allocate resources based on principles of economic rationality. It is within the family that the consequences of migration can be analyzed most vividly as immigrant men and women around the world confront labor markets that privilege one group over the other and that contribute to the renegotiation of the gender division of labor.”

When she is not teaching and researching, Professor Toro-Morn may be found indulging in one of her passions: salsa dancing. But, most of her time outside of the academy is spent raising her little boy, Carlitos. Toro-Morn and her husband are educating their young son to be bicultural and bilingual; so, much of their time is spent helping Carlitos learn.

Professor Toro-Morn earned her Ph.D. from Loyola University in Chicago. She earned her M.A. here at Illinois State and holds a B.A. from Interamerican University in San German, Puerto Rico. Toro-Morn was Visiting Professor in the Department of Philosophy and Sociology at Lanzhou University; Lanzhou, China in 1998 and was Research Fellow at the Center for Latino Research at DePaul University in 1997.